Lars Rasmussen Explains Why He Quit Google To Join Facebook

Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps spoke publicly about why he decided to quit Google and join Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a personal pitch about why he wanted Lars to come to his company.
“It feels to me that Facebook may be a sort of once-in-a-decade type of company,” stated Rasmussen. “Obviously they’ve already changed the world and yet there seems to be so much more to be done there. And I think that it’s the right place for me to be.”

Lars said that if you asked him two or three years ago whether Facebook would be big, he wouldn’t have picked it. Rasmussen is leaving Sydney, Australia to join Facebook in Silicon Valley next month.

Rasmussen was one of the main engineers behind Google Wave, but the search engine company decided to pull the plug on that project. “We were not quite the success that Google was hoping for, and trying to persuade them not to pull the plug and ultimately failing was obviously a little stressful,” said Lars.